The Hard Fork by Marvin Liao

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Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 19th, 2022
hardfork.substack.com

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 19th, 2022

The Hard Fork by Marvin Liao
Jun 19
Share this post
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 19th, 2022
hardfork.substack.com

“If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it! “—Jonathan Winters

  1. This is super interesting. I've long been fascinated by Uzbekistan and can't wait to visit later this year.

https://mailchi.mp/75db53df45c5/investing-in-uzbekistan-in-2022-a-unique-frontier-market?e=123a1c25c4

2. I love Monk Mode (every once in a while). Kudos to my friend Jarie Bolander

https://www.thedailymba.com/2022/05/28/entrepreneur-monk-mode

3. Another great episode of Not Investing Advice. Ad biz implosion & Snap stock destruction.

4. This is a grim listen but deglobalization is here. How to prepare for the new world.

5. This looks like a great documentary. "Expedition Happiness."

6. Sounds familiar right? Happening in the USA now.

"Rampant greed and power-mongering were commonplace, tearing great rends throughout the economic and moral fibre of society. And corruption was so rife, that it had almost become expected of the political ruling class of society as a tool of governance.

The common people of Athens didn’t fare well during this time. The population was kept in line mostly through fear, with regular executions being the favoured tool of guaranteeing compliance—a punishment that was sometimes dished out for offences as trifling as cabbage theft.

Throughout history, whenever a society was experiencing such a rampant level of rot, it often led to an economic chasm between the rich and the poor. And for Athens, this fact definitely held true."

The answer:

"If inflation continues to rise—which I and many others expect it to do in the near future—it could be worth your time to consider other vessels in which to store and grow your wealth. The most obvious beneficiaries so far have been real estate, as well as food and energy commodities like oil, natural gas, wheat, and coffee."

Abundantia
Money printer goes "brrrrrrr".
In the year 600 B.C., the civilisation of Athens was in a state of decay. Rampant greed and power-mongering were commonplace, tearing great rends throughout the economic and moral fibre of society. An…
Read more
a month ago · 71 likes · 6 comments · Abundantia

7. Good overview of what’s happening in the east of Ukraine. Cautiously optimistic that Russia is losing steam. 

8. Commodities super cycle is here. Metals and Mining.

9. "All of this has led some crypto investors to wonder if the bottom is really in; with so much "fluff" in the air, maybe there is more left to fall to Earth. In any case, it's clear that nobody has learned anything."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gw55/nobody-learned-anything-from-the-crypto-crash

10. "Simply way to zoom out is to just ask where the world is heading. It’s up to *you* to decide these things. That said, some easy ones we don’t see coming back any time soon include:

1) massive commutes to cities - over the next 5-10 years the companies that offer remote solutions will take the talents,

2) don’t see a world with less automation,

3) don’t see a world where people speak to robots instead of physical sales people and nurses/doctors,

4) don’t see a world where manufacturing *isn’t* dominated by tech/robots etc and

5) see a world where valuable individuals gain more and more value as low-mid skilled work can be automated away. 

These are just broad strokes. We separate them based on how humans operate. Unlikely a human wants to have a robot caring after him in a hospital. On the flip side. Really doubt humans care if their coca-cola was fork lifted by a person or a robot (no human contact = easier to automate)."

BowTied Bull
Basic Finance 101 - Value of the Company
Welcome Avatar! Now that everyone can read an income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement it is time to talk about valuing each company. As a reminder, when you buy a stock (or share) you’re purchasing a small bit of ownership of the Company. If you were to buy say 1M shares of a stock that has 100M total shares outstanding, you’d own 1% of …
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a month ago · 55 likes · 8 comments · BowTied Bull

11. This is pretty good stuff. Peer group is important.

12. This is a good discussion. I'm on Brent's side. We underestimate USA's strength as messed up as the country is.

13. Congrats Jessica Peltz-Zatulove! Awesome new VC fund.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/31/hannah-grey-debut-fund

14. Go JohnnyFD, worth watching. Minimalist living. 

15. This is a pretty interesting new fund.

“I didn’t want this to be a fund that was too big, or greater than 20 million, because I can participate in many rounds. I can also invest in the very, very early stages, so I’m not trying to compete necessarily for a certain percentage of ownership. I can write relatively small checks and still be a meaningful part of the startup journey very early on,” Iyer said."

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/02/microsoft-web3-solo-gp-venture-fund-backs-crypto-developer-tools-infrastructure

16. "There is going to be a big bull market in real stuff!"

17. "Life in an armed compound, surrounded by your starving and desperate neighbors banging on the gates, is no happy retirement — not for anyone with a smidgen of empathy, anyway. The only worse fate is being on other side of the wall, clawing at the fence.

Retirement is a social problem, not an individual one. It is one of those parts of our world where our destines are inextricably bound together, like, say, public health. And as with public health, the attempt at converting a social, collective issue into an individual, market-based one has been an abject failure."

https://doctorow.medium.com/against-cozy-catastrophies-7ac0a62f0922

18. "Without a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, a major U.S. and Western military objective should be to provide sufficient military assistance to help Ukraine retake territory in the east and south. If the United States and the West want to shift the balance of power in Ukraine’s favor, they will need to provide Ukraine with more weapons and platforms that allow the Ukrainian military to conduct offensive operations and more effective counterattacks against dug-in Russian forces over a sustained period.

Most of these systems will require additional training and a steady supply of munitions and spare parts, which should be feasible with a protracted war. More advanced weapons and platforms will be critical to overrun entrenched Russian forces. In addition, Ukraine needs to conduct a sustained guerilla campaign behind Russian lines that involves ambushes, raids, sabotage, and subversion against Russian forces and political leaders hand-picked by Moscow to replace local Ukrainian officials."

https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-ill-fated-invasion-ukraine-lessons-modern-warfare

19. "Fundraising is not a reward for the past. It’s selling a ticket to the future. You don’t earn a round. You sell it.

Therefore, traction is but one aspect of a story that you’re pitching to support how things will go—and how you fit that in is not unlike putting the legs on a stool to get it to stand up."

This is going to be BIG
The Legs of the Stool and Why It's Tough to Compare Two Startups Raising
If you’re out raising, it’s quite normal for you to peer over the fence and see how far other founders are getting at the same stage. The most obvious attribute for comparison is stage—have they launched, do they have paying customers, etc. Unfortunately, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how startups raise…
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2 months ago · 11 likes · Charlie O'Donnell

20. I like this alot!

"Think of the Freedom ETF as a close relative of popu­lar ESG funds, but instead of worrying about the environment or corporate governance, Tolle avoids investing in regimes that infringe on personal and economic freedoms."

“Freer markets have more sustainable growth. They recover faster from drawdowns and they use their capital and labor more efficiently,” Tolle says. “I always expected that they would outperform, but I didn’t expect it to play out this quickly.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hanktucker/2022/05/24/beat-the-market-by-investing-in-freedom--and-shunning-places-like-russia-and-china

21. “That phase of the war is over,” Konaev said. “This phase is more grinding, piecemeal.” Because of the radical shift in the nature of the battlefield, the weapons on offer have to change dramatically, too."

Slava Ukraini!

https://www.vox.com/2022/6/4/23150697/how-ukraines-new-weapons-different-battlefield-russia-himars-nato

22. Hubris is dangerous. Good discussion on whether the west is drawing the right conclusions from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

https://warontherocks.com/2022/05/would-we-do-better-hubris-and-validation-in-ukraine

23. "Courage is the master of the virtues, because it makes the practice of all others possible. Inadvertently, we tend to think of courage as an attribute of the successful, but this is mistaken. We call Achilles brave not because we think he will win, but because we know he is going to die. It is the process, not the success, that deserves our respect.

Courage then is best understood as a willingness to put failure on the line. To cultivate courage is to accept an absence of surety. It is meaningful mostly when you are unlikely to succeed, and try anyway. Try and fail at enough things, and it will dawn on you: Every difficult thing you try acts as a multiplier on the rest of your knowledge and experience. He who lives without folly is not as wise as he thinks.

The too-clever world breeds critics, and laughs at failure. If you never try, you cannot fail, and in a clever sense it is an immense advantage to have done nothing."

The Map is Mostly Water
What the Lion Knows
He who lives without folly is not as wise as he thinks. —François de La Rochefoucauld “Get going, then get good.” —David Perell There is a saying from Plutarch, “Where the lion’s skin will not reach, you must patch it out with the fox’s.” It is good advice: strength and courage may get you much of the way, but an ounce of cleverness is often necessary for s…
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8 months ago · 37 likes · 1 comment · Simon Sarris

24. "The new global monetary system is likely going to look like Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia and other countries with commodity-backed, sound money on one side - and the west and our allies, with our “infinite” fiat, under the tutelage of rocket surgeon Neel Kashkari, on the other."

QTR’s Fringe Finance
Russia Is Returning To The Gold Standard And China Is Going To Be Next
No sooner was it that I wrote an article talking about how Russia was going to back the ruble with gold than “one of the Russia’s most powerful security/intelligence officers and a close ally of Putin” has admitted the country’s intentions to do just that…
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2 months ago · 51 likes · 18 comments · Quoth the Raven

25. War for the West. Swarm versus the Horde.

Global Guerrillas
The War for the Future
World War 3 is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. Marshall McLuhan 1968 The western world is now engaged in a guerrilla information war, and it’s a guerrilla war where everyone is a participant, whether they know it or not. We can see evidence of this war all around us…
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a month ago · 19 likes · John Robb

26. "Virtue lies in giving things their proper place. To lack reason is to be inhuman. To rely on it solely is to be disembodied. This disembodied nature is the vice of the modern intellectual, in fact it separates them from past intellectuals just as it separates them from the physical world. Thinking only in the abstract, existing only in the abstract, the disembodied intellectual life becomes the destructive force of authoritarian modernism."

The Map is Mostly Water
In Praise of the Gods
When you have offered your libation and have prayed, as is right, hand your comrade the cup of honey wine, so he may pour out his libation, too, for he looks like someone who offers prayers to the immortals. All men need the gods. the stupor of rationality • stories, building intuition • alchemy, building process • religion, building wonder…
Read more
2 years ago · 174 likes · 38 comments · Simon Sarris

27. "His swift move to found a defense startup—partnering with libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and executives drawn from Thiel’s spooky spy software maker Palantir—completed Luckey’s spiritual exit from left-leaning Silicon Valley. He departed physically, too. Anduril is headquartered in Costa Mesa, closer to San Diego’s military bases than the center of the metaverse in Menlo Park.

After losing friends who criticized him as a warmonger, Luckey is suddenly feeling vindicated. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where Anduril has systems on the ground (he won’t say what precisely), some people are reaching out to apologize. They now realize “it is actually really important for the U.S. to have better weapons,” he says."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2022/06/03/palmer-luckey-anduril

28. Anatomy of a trend.

8Ball
Anatomy of a Vibe Shift
Read more
a month ago · 50 likes · 2 comments · Sean Monahan

29. "Professor Cippola brings texture to a common word with a cocktail: stupid decisions are actions that are bad for you and damaging to others. Just as we underestimate the number of stupid people, we underestimate the business world’s, and seemingly successful people’s, ability to make stupid decisions that damage themselves and others. Success is literally an intoxicant that makes you more risk aggressive and impairs your peripheral vision to reality and risks."

https://www.profgalloway.com/big-stupid

30. This is a fun episode of Not Investment Advice.

31. Solid summary of what’s happening in the economy today.

kyla’s Newsletter
People are What Matters, Actually
Okay so a lot happened, and here is a mere fraction of it. If you’re already subscribed, thank you! If you’d like to subscribe, please do so here: YouTube and podcast up soon! Also, as a shout to a fellow newsletter writer, Jack Raines does a good job exploring investing thematics, including the underlying psychology that drives us to do things both good …
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23 days ago · 28 likes · 3 comments · kyla scanlon

32. Hard to argue with this.

"For those of you that have been outside, a Lich is a kind of undead creature that is, to quote my good friend and D&D fanatic Phil Broughton, “an abomination that required abominable act to come into being, more to sustain itself...a corrupt form of immortality in undeath.” These creatures can be quite powerful but require immense amounts of energy to continue to exist and very much should not exist at all. Their owners always claim their existence is necessary and justify said existence in a damnable and irresponsible way.

The liches of the valley are both the founders themselves and the venture capitalists, existing in a continual rotation of unsustainable growth and absorption, sustaining companies until they can experience a liquidity event - an IPO or an acquisition. The “unholy” nature is that these companies have the appearance of an entity one can trust - as a vendor, as a customer, and as an employer, and are kept alive through unholy, undeserved capital. The longer they last in these unsustainable cycles, the more damage they are likely to cause in their inevitable contractions or death - through layoffs, dumping customers with little notice, and the overall dependence that a supposedly-respectable company grows with anyone that they interact with.

The only solution is a reconciliation with the difference between a good idea and a good business. A company that provides a service that people like in an unsustainable way is a bad company, even if you really like it and use it all the time. A new company that provides a service at an unbelievable price may be providing it at that price simply to draw in customers in the hopes that they can find a way to monetize them further in the future, but with no rigorous plan to do so."

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
The Liches of Silicon Valley
In the years I’ve done publicity for tech products, companies, and personas, I’ve been fairly direct with clients that I am looking for a path to profitability and a sustainable business. While there are companies that I’ve worked with that are pre-revenue (IE: trying to work out how to make a good business that people will pay for), I’ve been fairly bl…
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24 days ago · 35 likes · 3 comments · Ed Z

33. "Since ICONIQ was founded in 2011, Makan has exploded the firm’s reach. ICONIQ is at once a family office for the ultra wealthy, a growth fund that competes with the likes of Tiger Global, a major real estate investor, and an impact investor. ICONIQ has invested in more than 120 companies, deploying $12.9 billion in capital.

Just as this epic bull run looked to be coming to a close — at the end of last year — ICONIQ’s assets under management totaled $83.5 billion, according to the private investor presentation.

What becomes of that massive wealth horde is an open question. Careers and fortunes are made at the tail end of a bull cycle. ICONIQ returned billions to its investors last year. But the firm deployed just as many billions. Will ICONIQs financial backers remember the money it returned or the expensive investments that it made in 2021?"

Newcomer
Inside ICONIQ Capital: How the Rich Got Richer
Read more
24 days ago · 10 likes · Eric Newcomer

34. This is AMAZING. Personal Freedom should be everyone’s goal.

My guess is I'm at level 2 or 3 here.

"Freedom of time and income doesn’t turn you into an asshole, but it reduces your tolerance for anyone not free or who isn’t interested in becoming free.

Level 2-3 also eliminates your tolerance for justifying anything in your life.Granted, this happens at all levels, but by the time you reach level 3, you’re so confirmed and happy with your decisions that others’ opinions don’t matter at all–this is a consequence of freedom. You really don’t care what other people think.

People either agree with your life, they shut up about your choices, or you cut them.

I find that level 2 is where this starts, and level 3 is where your freedom is so established that you just don’t waste time tolerating people. Ultimately, level 3 is where the mental and social shifts have caught up to the ones in your earning power and physical situation.

This is the level where all freedoms are unified."

https://edlatimore.com/personal-freedom

35. Insightful view on the future of work.

Twitter avatar for @DougAntinDoug Antin @DougAntin
We're living through a rapid digital transformation. The world now belongs to the people that leverage these 9 trends:

June 18th 2022

1 Retweet1 Like

36. Why Taiwan is not Ukraine.

37. This is not good news for Crypto. What goes up, must come down.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zw7x/founders-of-dollar10-billion-crypto-hedge-fund-have-ghosted-after-bets-go-bad

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